Based on an eighteenth century play by Nanboku Tsuruya, whose Yotsuya Kaidan is the definitive Japanese ghost drama, Shura is also a period piece set amid the violence of Yotsuya. It has all the trappings of a ghost drama, yet very elegantly eschews ghosts in favor of an ambiguous reality, shot entirely at night: deception follows upon deception into a Borgesian labyrinth. Toshio Matsumoto (Funeral Parade of Roses) plays as much with contemporary notions of the "real" in cinema as he does with classic tragedy in telling of the samurai Gengobe's vendetta, which turns to bloody revenge when he falls prey to an apparently unscrupulous couple. As in Kon Ichikawa's An Actor's Revenge, play-acting and voyeurism link fantasy to reality, but here it is Gengobe (portrayed by Katsuo Nakamura) who is drawn into a netherworld of spiraling confusion, lashing out at his own demons, while we watch from the wings. In To the Distant Observer (1979), Noel Burch writes, "Jean Ricardou has remarked, in writing of Borges, 'in fiction, the real and the virtual have the same status, since both are established and governed by the laws of writing.' Matsumoto's film is one of the most masterful demonstrations of this theorem to be encountered in cinema. It is, moreover, one of the most important and beautiful films made in Japan since Kurosawa's prime...."